In the Great Plague of 1665, Cambridge was closed.
Isaac Newton used the time to develop a new theory of light, discover and quantify gravity and ... literally invented calculus.
Here I am, during the coronavirus outbreak, sitting on Zoom, trying to find a funny background.
— Matt Rickard (@mattrickard) March 9, 2020
I tweeted this when COVID-19 had only infected 100,000 people worldwide. Italy became the first country in the world to enter a lockdown.
The mystery of the miracle year by Dwarkesh Patel is a great blog post that's been floating around. It's actually synthesized a lot of topics that I've written about in a way that I could never. Dwarkesh explores the short bursts of intense productivity and discovery that great scientists had – Newton, Copernicus, von Neumann, and Gauss. It is worth the read.
Some ideas I've written about that are related: